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Overview

Longlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing

The lively and fascinating story of baseball’s 150-year hunt for the perfect pitch

In August 2012, Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners pitched a perfect game against the Tampa Bay Rays in what Terry McDermott calls “one of the greatest exhibitions of off-speed pitches ever put on.” For McDermott, a lifelong fan and student of baseball, the extraordinary events of that afternoon inspired this incisive meditation on the art of pitching.

Within the framework of Hernandez’s historic achievement, Off Speed provides a vibrant narrative of the history and evolution of pitching, combining baseball's rich tradition of folklore with the wealth of new metrics from a growing legion of statisticians who are transforming the way we think about the game. Off Speed is also the personal story of a fan’s steadfast devotion, first kindled in McDermott by his father at the local diamond in small-town Iowa and now carried forward with the same passion by his own daughters.

Approaching his subject with the love every fan brings to the park and the expertise of a probing journalist, McDermott explores with irrepressible curiosity the science and the romance of baseball.

Product Details

About the Author

TERRY McDERMOTT is a former national reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the author of three previous books: The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (co-authored with Josh Meyer); 101 Theory Drive: The Discovery of Memory; and Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers—Who They Were, Why They Did It. A native of Iowa, he now lives in southern California.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

THE FASTBALLAUGUST 15, 2012, SAFECO FIELD, SEATTLE, FIRST INNING

It is a typically gorgeous, sunny Wednesday afternoon in Seattle. To outlanders, the sun might seem a surprise, but Seattle summers are drenched in sunshine and dry, with long, languid evenings that can outlast a night game. If this is at odds with the image of Seattle as a wet, dark, and dour place inhabited mainly by caffeine addicts, hikers, and perhaps hobbits, well, it’s only a seasonal departure. It rains every day from November through June. A constant cloak of low gray clouds hangs like a mighty weight pressing down on your disposition. If the sun rises and sets—as has been rumored—it does so in secret, unseen by mortal men and women.

But once summer actually starts—stow the calendar, this is typically some days, perhaps weeks, after the Fourth of July—Seattle is a very summery place. This afternoon’s getaway game features the visiting Tampa Bay Rays ver­sus the home-standing Seattle Mariners. The teams are headed in opposite directions—the Rays streaking up into the thick, dangerous atmosphere of a pennant race, the Mariners stumbling down the basement staircase. Again.

The Mariners don’t have enough history to have become endearing like the Cubs or bitterly tragic like the once and possibly future Red Sox. They lack the brickworked ivy or sentimental melodramatics necessary to usher the fran­chise into cultural sainthood. There is abundant misery here, but few martyrs. The team has nonetheless been very good at losing. They’ve played thirty-nine seasons and have finished with more wins than losses in about a third of them. They made it to the playoffs in four of those win­ning seasons, slightly more than once per decade. They are at this writing one of only two current franchises that have never played in the World Series, much less won it.*

The 2012 season, like so many before it, had become a lost cause well before the All-Star break. Yet another rebuilding plan was under way, and the lineup had been turned over to prospects and pretenders in the hope of finding out which were which. The team’s lone star, Ichiro Suzuki, recently had been traded off to enemy lands to give him a last chance at glory and, not inconveniently, remove his huge salary from future payrolls. Unusually for such a wretched team, Seattle had produced a number of the game’s great players over the past quarter-century—the exquisite artist Ichiro; the sluggers Ken Griffey, Jr., and Alex Rodriguez; the best right-handed hitter of his generation, Edgar Martinez; and one of the most intimidating pitchers of all time, the gangly, angry southpaw Randy Johnson.

Ichiro was—oddly, given some of the things he did in the batter’s box—supremely elegant and a big fan favorite. He has also been one of the best players in the majors for a decade and is the last link to any past greatness the fran­chise had ever enjoyed—he was the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 2001, when the team won a major league record of 116 games.

The man who is supposed to be the foundation upon which future greatness would be built, Felix Hernandez, is taking the mound this Wednesday afternoon. Hernandez, a husky right-hander, had been a genuine, classically old-fashioned teenage phenom, arriving for good in the major leagues as a nineteen-year-old flamethrower in 2005. He had been signed by the Mariners as a pudgy sixteen-year-old high school kid from Valencia, Venezuela. His abilities were so advanced he was given the blogosphere nickname King Felix almost as soon as he started his brief three-year minor league apprenticeship. He had since lived up to the name, quickly becoming one of the best pitchers in the game. Winning the American League’s Cy Young award in 2010 merely formalized his status.

Despite his team’s lousy record, Hernandez was having one of his better seasons in 2012. In the weeks before this game, he had been virtually unhittable. Included in that stretch were complete game shutouts against the entrenched powers of the league—the Texas Rangers, New York Yankees, and Boston Red Sox. In eleven starts, he had given up on average a hit every other inning and had allowed more than two runs just once. His earned run average over that span was 1.73. He was striking out five times as many people as he walked.

Opposing hitters were reduced to mumbles. David Ortiz, the great Red Sox slugger, suggested King Felix was inhuman. Ortiz’s teammate Dustin Pedroia said after one game that in four at bats against Hernandez, he was thrown just a single pitch that he thought it was even possible to hit.

Consider the major league hitter’s basic problem. The pitcher stands on a small hill sixty feet six inches—give or take a foot, depending on where in the batter’s box the hitter stands—away. The pitcher strides forward before he throws, and, by the time he releases the ball, has already shrunk the distance between him and the hitter by almost 10 percent. An average fastball from an average pitcher leaves his hand at about 90 mph. A pitcher of average size throwing at average speed gives the hitter approximately four-tenths of a second to see, identify, and attack a pitch. That is about how long it takes to blink your eyes twice.

The batter is using an implement uniquely unsuitable to accomplishing his task. A baseball bat is normally somewhat less than a yard long; it weighs somewhere between twenty-nine and thirty-six ounces. At its thickest part it is 2.25 inches in diameter. If the bat is to strike the ball solidly, the ball must hit near the center of the bat’s circumference about six inches from the bat’s end. The spot varies from bat to bat, depending on the type and hardness of the wood and the shape and weight of the bat, but at its largest this spot is about five square inches in area.

Think of that for a moment. A hitter must swing a yard-long piece of round wood in such a way that he contacts a small round ball moving faster than he is legally allowed to drive his car. The contact has to occur within a five-square-inch area of the wood. The plane of the strike zone varies from hitter to hitter but is theoretically seventeen inches wide and approximately two feet tall. Of course, the zone is not a plane at all, but a volume of approximately 4.5 cubic feet. It extends from the front of home plate to the rear, and a ball passing through it at any point is supposed to be a strike. In real life, the zone tends to be wider and shorter than the rulebook stipulates. Nonetheless, the batter is defending more than four cubic feet of space with a five-square-inch weapon, and he has to swing the bat at a speed of 70 mph in order to move it from his shoulder to the center of the plate. “It is far more likely that the pitcher will accidentally throw the ball in the way of the hitter’s bat than it is for the hitter to time the pitch perfectly and execute flawless swing mechanics to achieve 100 percent on-time contact on their own,” according to Perry Husband, who has studied pitcher-batter interactions extensively.

The deck, in other words, is stacked.* As long as he doesn’t throw the ball at the hitter’s head, a pitcher can do pretty much anything he wants. And sometimes he can also do that. Baseball is one of the few sports in which the defense—the pitcher’s team—initiates the action. The hitter is on offense in name only. The offense is utterly reactive and is only called the offense because the score is kept depending on how it performs. It’s as if the middle linebacker scored a point every time he stuffed a run in the three-hole. The nomenclature derives from baseball’s earliest days, when the pitcher’s sole job was to set the play in motion. In the mid-nineteenth century, pitchers threw underhand and were required not to do anything to deceive the hitter. Runs scored by the dozen. Games lasted all day. Things have changed.

With a few exceptions, some notable,† the history of baseball since has been an arms race, pitchers developing new weapons to deploy against hitters. Every time hitters somehow manage to catch up, pitchers regroup and devise new weapons.

It began with allowing pitchers to get a running start, as in a cricket match, then throwing overhand; pretty soon pitchers were doing everything they could dream up to frustrate hitters. They smeared mud on the ball, scratched and scarred it, spit on it, threw it from every arm angle they could achieve. The worst of this—well, a little of the worst of this—was gradually eliminated, and by the turn of the twentieth century the game had a regularized set of rules, an established strike zone, and looked more or less like the modern game.

Table of Contents

1 The Fastball 32 The Curveball 383 The Spitball 664 The Sinker 815 The Knuckleball 1036 The Slider 1257 The Split 1398 The Cutter 1519 The Change 160

Appendix: The Box Score 177Acknowledgments 181Notes 183

Editorial Reviews

12/12/2016Blending memoir with a baseball fan’s musings, McDermott (Perfect Soldiers) offers entertaining and wistful notes on the craft of pitching. Focusing on one pitcher, Seattle Mariners hurler Felix Hernandez, and one game between the Mariners and the Tampa Bay Rays on August 15, 2012, McDermott discusses various pitches—including the spitball, curveball, fastball, sinker, and knuckleball—and how they developed. He introduces pitchers who invented and excelled at certain pitches, such as Arthur “Candy” Cummings, who first developed the curveball, and R.A. Dickey, today’s most active knuckleball pitcher. McDermott deftly points out that the best pitchers are so practiced at the art of deception that they’re able to hide from a batter which pitch is coming even after the pitch has been released. He writes that the most common way for pitchers to throw a fastball that moves differently than the batter expects is to throw one that sinks. McDermott demystifies baseball, illustrating the game’s “secret beauty” from being built over a very long time. The chapters are sometimes repetitive and he refers to the New York Yankees as “Yankee.” These are enjoyable fan’s notes that might have been better published as a series of articles. (May)

Publishers Weekly

McDermott describes nine pitches, weaving player and coach interviews into an absorbing examination of this arcane art.” —Daniel M. Gold, The New York Times Book Review

“A deeply felt portrayal of the men on the mound.” —Will Leitch, The Atlantic“A nostalgic and witty tribute to the cunning and craft of baseball pitchers. . . . Engaging. . . . Delightful. . . . A treat for statistics junkies [and] readers who appreciate the human dimension of the sport. . . . McDermott is a wonderful person with whom to share a baseball game.” —Tom Zelman, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“What lover of the game will not delight in McDermott’s field-of-dreams nostalgia for the baseball he played and watched growing up in his small Iowa hometown? No one passionate about America’s national pastime will leave these pages disappointed.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A lovely memoir of the game as it is played from Iowa sandlots to the Kingdome, along with a fascinating and absorbing history of pitching. A terrific book for both beginners and longtime fans.”—Kevin Baker, author of America the Ingenious

“Nine innings, nine pitches, one hell of a book. Off Speed is a must-read for any fan of the magic that can be found at the intersection of New School data and Old School romance.”—Ian O’Connor, author of The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

“Off Speed is baseball magic. As soon as Terry McDermott set down thirteen deft definitions of pitches, with which I happily began to quibble, then gave me Willie Stargell likening the attempt to hit Sandy Koufax to trying to drink coffee with a fork, I fell into a flow state that held to the last chapter.”—David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K

“A fascinating history of pitching mixed with scientific facts, psychological insights, delightful digressions about small-town American life, and the heart-thumping play-by-play of Felix Hernandez’s march to perfection. I always knew that King Felix was great, but now I know why.”—Zack Hample, author of The Baseball

“A paean to baseball from the perspective of an experienced fan. Off Speed is the rare book that goes deep inside the sport with an approach accessible to insiders and novices alike. Its crisp writing offers historic foundation while conveying, in full bloom, the depth of the author’s passion.”—Jason Turbow, author of Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic

From the Publisher

04/01/2017Hall of Fame pitcher Warren Spahn famously said that hitting is timing and pitching is upsetting timing. How players are able to achieve that is mystifying to even the most astute baseball fans. Pitching has evolved far more rapidly than any other position, especially the variety of pitches thrown. McDermott (Perfect Soldiers) explores this evolution in his latest work, which is structured around the names of well-known pitches, such as the fastball, the curve, and the knuckleball. However, there are two other recurring narratives: memories from the author's childhood and personal life, and an inning-by-inning recount of Félix Hernández's perfect game thrown on August 15, 2012. While the book is ostensibly about pitching, McDermott's intimate asides can be lengthy. Fortunately, his stories are engaging and add warmth and personality, making this work more accessible then Robert Adair's The Physics of Baseball. VERDICT Providing both insight into the art of pitching and a memoir on the role of the game in the life of a baseball fan, this work will be enjoyed by all lovers of the sport.—Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L.

Library Journal

2017-01-16Former Los Angeles Times national reporter McDermott (101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory, 2010, etc.) changes pace with a book about baseball focused on the craft of pitching.The author is an avid fan of the Seattle Mariners, so he constructs his taxonomy of pitching around the perfect game pitched by Mariners' ace Félix Hernández on Aug. 15, 2012. In a variety of asides, the author relates how growing up in small-town Iowa offered the foundation for his romance with baseball. (The author opens with a mention of Field of Dreams.) The chapters often veer off into nostalgia, sometimes featuring searing insights into rural life during the 1950s and '60s and other times coming off as trite. When McDermott focuses on Hernández's perfect game, he provides an effective blow-by-blow account. The author relies on the box score from that day, news coverage of the game, and interviews with major leaguers, including Hernández himself. In the sections in which McDermott writes about the evolution of specific pitches—e.g., traditional fastball, two-seam fastball, four-seam fastball, cutter, curve, slider, knuckleball, changeup, sinker, screwball, forkball, and the now-illegal spitter ("a pitch to which a foreign substance has been applied, causing the pitch to drop suddenly as it approaches home plate")—he also offers some brief digressions regarding baseball history in general. At times, McDermott makes pronouncements about the most talented pitchers that might be deemed controversial by some baseball scholars and fans—did Sandy Koufax throw the best fastball and the best curveball ever?—but the narrative is filled with passion and insight into how the game's measured pace can seem both out of touch with fast-paced contemporary life and a temporary corrective to that fast pace. The book will likely bore or baffle those not already passionate about baseball, but it will please die-hard fans.

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